Produced specifically for ICA LA as part of the 2024 Scientia Sexualis exhibition, artist Chris E. Vargas and his “imaginary” Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art (MOTHA) take over the museum bathrooms. Reading is Transcendental transforms what is often an overdetermined site of violent surveillance and legislative transphobia into an intergenerational reading room. The wallpaper represents the real-life bookshelves of Vargas’s community, including fiction, sexology, self-help, biography, manifesto, and theory. The titles convey both the wide radius of trans literature and the problem of categorization at large, nodding to the thorny task of unmaking a canon. Honoring MOTHA’s tactical and parasitic relation to art institutions, this temporary installation asks if it is possible to compile a visual history of an identity category for which language is relative, contested, and evolving. While you may not be able to take a book off this shelf, we hope you leave with a long list of titles to take to your local independent bookstore.